Ann Kipling

With a light, free hand, this B.C. artist captures the changing face of her mountain home.

BY: Portia Priegert

Most mornings, Ann Kipling trudges up the hill behind her house, lugging her drawing board to a shady vantage point with a panoramic view of the Salmon River valley near Falkland, British Columbia. Kipling, now in her 70s, sits on the ground and waits for something to inspire her, whether clouds hovering over a distant ridge or sunlight splashing over a rocky outcrop.

Kipling has been drawing the rugged mountains around her rural home in the B.C. interior with singular focus for the last 15 years. She’s stoic about the challenges of working outdoors in conditions that include rainsqualls, blustery winds and occasional encounters with bears. She talks about seeing the land more deeply as the years pass. “It’s always different,” she says, “because the light changes and the weather changes.” Working on paper in media ranging from graphite and charcoal to ink and aquarelle pencil, Kipling invokes a flurry of wispy gestural marks in acutely observed yet airy drawings. Her unique style holds the energy of quick figure sketches, yet she typically sustains each drawing for three hours, mapping sweeping panoramas rimmed by hump-backed hills, their bulk obscured by vast stands of trees.

In a recent essay, Liz Wylie, curator of the Kelowna Art Gallery described Kipling’s work as so intense as to be almost hallucinatory. “I think her actual subject is the consciousness within that landscape,” Wylie says. “The living presence that is the natural environment, with which her own consciousness from time to time blends or merges.”

Kipling talks in almost mystical terms about drawing, saying she does little conscious planning. “I have no idea what it’s going to be. It’s just this thing — whatever it is. This phenomenon of the moment is for me so incredible that it just takes over everything.” Perhaps that’s one reason Kipling’s work is so serial. Drawing by drawing, day by day, she simply responds to what she sees. In the process, she has created a vast visual diary documenting the passage of time. Kipling was born in Victoria and moved to the B.C. interior with her partner, Leonhard Epp, a ceramic artist, some 30 years ago after living in various locales on the Lower Mainland. She maintains ties with the West Coast through her dealer, Douglas Udell, and was deemed a significant enough regional artist to merit a solo exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1995.

Although known primarily for her drawings, Kipling produced prints as a student at the Vancouver School of Art, and early in her career in the 1960s. The National Gallery of Canada purchased two of the prints, but Kipling has since largely abandoned the medium.

While landscape is a mainstay, Kipling has gone through periods of drawing people and animals. She engages them with the same intense focus, allowing her pencil to track their movements and facial inflections, trying to capture the transient quality of the encounter.

“I work directly from my subject without putting labels on things,” she says. “We tend to live in a world of symbols – this is a tree, this is a mountain, this is a face. And if there is any deviation from that image, it becomes disturbing, because that is what we expect. I look at things as much as possible without a preconceived idea of what these things look like … it’s always the idea of discovery.”

Ann Kipling’s work will be on exhibition at the Two Rivers Gallery in Prince George, B.C. May 14 to July 25,2010. Her work is represented in Edmonton and Vancouver by the Douglas Udell Gallery.